An Accessible World.

Our two main focuses for business is providing great customer service and at prices that attract customers that would not normally be able to use data centres.

This is why we found this news from the Guardian worth sharing.

PwC has recently released a report stating if we brought internet access to 4.1 billion people who don’t have it, the global economy would increase by $6.7 trillion. This would raise 500 million people out of poverty.

Now, this goliath of a task seems to get hit by a shrink ray to a more manageable size when you find out the infrastructure is in place for nine-tenths of the world population. It’s just that they can’t afford to access it.

A 500MB data plan costs more than 5% of their monthly income. The author of the report described this as “unaffordable”. This is the situation of 66% of the world.

What’s the cost?

China has just 22% of its population with a high enough income to make a basic data plan affordable. Despite this, they have 46% of its population online. Why don’t we just reduce the cost if the infrastructure is there? Well, if we were to get 80% of Ethiopia’s, Nigeria’s and the Philippines’s population online, they would have to reduce the cost by well over 90%.

Currently, most of the world’s mobile spectrum is delivered over 2G. If it was upgraded to 3G or 4G the cost would fall significantly. But this requires capital, not only from the carrier but from the users as well.

Facebook’s Internet.org project ties in with these cost reductions. It aims to partner with carriers in developing nations to provide the populations with low-cost internet. However, this project has gained criticism as there are issues around net neutrality.

The so-called zero rating essentially subsections the internet to allow users to access certain websites like Facebook and Wikipedia, without paying for data. But now we are getting to whole different kettle of fish.

We think the statistics and predictions in this report just show how important it is to make technology accessible. One of the reasons our founder started Datacentreplus was the lack of flexibility by many of the UK’s data centres. This is something we are changing and will continue to do so.

Our ‘Pay as you Grow’ (PAYG) makes colocation for customers accessible and doesn’t penalize them if they start off small. The aim is in the name, we want our customers to grow and our flexible approach aims to do so with excellent margins for partners and no up-front commitment. Our PAYG programme is very flexible and accessible to all and we want to provide businesses with a partner they can grow with.